Today I’ve found out that silene, one of the Wesnoth developers, has taken the decision to withdraw support for autotools (a.k.a. autoconf+automake, or configure + Make) without previous warning or discussion with the rest of the development team and distribution packagers.

Author: silene <silene@xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon Dec 27 11:10:54 2010 +0000
Discontinued support for building with autotools.
Since r48086, wesnoth no longer builds (due to duplicate strings), and it would be a lot of work to fix the build system, so better drop it.
git-svn-id: svn+ssh://svn.gna.org/svn/wesnoth/trunk@48092 xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

This came completely out of the blue, as you can see. I can’t really say whether I agree with this decision or not, however, in an ideal world it would not have been done without previous discussion in the developers mailing list at the very least.

Although I’ve spoken in the past against SCons (blah), it is my preferred build system nowadays thanks to its ease of use, simple management of multiple build configurations and loonycyborg’s hard work on improving our build scripts.

This is just one of the many upcoming changes in Wesnoth 1.9.4, but one substantial enough to require some previous preparation for those who are used to the good old configure script. Hopefully this will not be a too disruptive change for our users, but in case you feel profoundly affected by the decision, now you know who to complain to.

To begin this holidays week, I have introduced a few minor changes to the Wesnoth forums which should hopefully increase organization and ease of communication amongst us.

First, there’s now a separate Miscellaneous forum dedicated to those silly Forum Games, which is not indexed, doesn’t account for post counts, and doesn’t have an associated Atom feed unlike the rest of the board. Its topics are not listed in the Active topics view either.

Second, we now have new profile fields that can be optionally filled-in by users wanting to share with the community a bit more of information about themselves. These are the gender, languages and IRC nickname items. They are all displayed in the regular individual profile view, as well as in your User Control Panel, and may be modified visiting User Control Panel → Profile → Edit Profile.

(Wesnoth.org being an international community, it makes sense to allow people to tell us what languages they speak so we may be able to give them assistance in their natural language whenever applicable, or to help us choose new moderators.)

Not too long ago, I forked a branch from Wesnoth’s trunk and started committing stuff to it in the mainline repository, thanks to the awesome power of Git branching through the git-svn bridge. My main goal is to experiment with improvements to the add-ons download interface, trying to address some of our users’ most common complaints, while not touching trunk directly to allow Ilor — who’s in charge of the WIP new add-ons server/client implementation — to easily merge his changes with trunk and the other way around until I can get confirmation from him about the mergeability of my own work.

Right now there’s very little done in my umcmg branch, but today I’ve come up with some patches that should be trivial to mix into trunk.

Pictured to the right is the new Add-on Description dialog (taddon_description), intended to finish my quick-and-dirty hack from September 2009, which made it to trunk nearly at the same time as a string freeze entered in effect, making it impossible for me to polish this feature for 1.8.

At the left you can see something potentially less interesting, a work-in-progress Download progress viewer (taddon_download_progress) that is written using mordante’s GUI2 toolkit instead of the old GUI1. This is hardly usable right now, and in fact, crashes the game, proving yet again that I’m not really fit for messing with the network layer of our dear game.

It’s really tempting to just run over the Download/Update dialogs with a steamroller, but mordante’s got his own plans for that and the GUI2 listbox widget, which will unconditionally become a basic building block of the hypothetical, unified add-ons manager dialog, plus there’s also Ilor’s work on the new server/client; therefore I can only wait for now until these matters are settled and try to have something ready for 1.10 as a last resort if neither of the aforementioned solutions are available by the time we hit another string/feature-freeze period.

Today, around 15:00 UTC, the Wesnoth.org board was disabled by none other than me, in order to perform some maintenance work in the forum files. With this, the forums were upgraded from phpBB 3.0.7-PL1 to phpBB 3.0.8 and one mod was updated to a newer version still awaiting validation from the phpBB mods team.

Additionally, I added a new server-side redirection rule to convert old http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/ and http://wesnoth.org/forum/ links to use the current forums vhostname, forums.wesnoth.org. This should solve issues with inconsistent links lingering around and polluting people’s bookmarks and web pages with different forum paths — of course, this is not automatic and existing references need to be manually updated to reflect any required changes, but at least now /forum has got a well deserved final rest.

There isn’t really any other exciting news to share with you, although I do expect an undefined amount of users to have login problems the next time they visit the forums. This should not be a permanent issue, however, but if it turns out to be I have a solution (a.k.a. “plan B”) prepared for the occasion.

The only major change in this version is the addition of zoom support in the user interface, so you can take a look at your team-colored pixel art at 100%, 200%, 400% and 800%, or even at 50%. No more levels are supported at the moment, and will probably never be unless you submit a patch — this is really just supposed to be a help tool, so if you need more exotic zoom levels use a real graphics manipulation tool such as Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP. And don’t forget you can also drag and drop images now!

There’s also a brand-new grayed-out menu for you to observe and admire. Only observe — don’t touch it.

As with the last time, the instructions for building the source are in the included INSTALL file in the distribution archive. This file is not present in the Win32 distribution for obvious reasons.

Don’t hesitate to comment on RCX’s development, usability, bugs, or suggest new features! The only way things can get fixed or improved is that you make sure I am aware of what needs to be changed. If you think you can help with something else, please tell me!

After so much work, codename “Hakone”, the new website layout and software powering the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website is finished, bringing with it a series of changes to begin to renew the project for the upcoming new year.

Ancient, old, and new

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website has gone through three revisions counting “Hakone” — “Soradoc” and “Kalari” being its predecessors.

My emphasis during the construction of codename “Hakone” was placed on functionality, standards compliance at the web interface level, and a soft, elegant and modern look, all of which I think have been accomplished. Through the integration of technologies such as XML feeds using SimplePie, and the minimalistic yet extensible blog engine provided by Blosxom along with our homegrown Poison Ivy PHP engine, we have achieved our ultimate objective of establishing our own network identity as an independent, parallel project to Battle for Wesnoth.

We have also added an embedded IRC client using freenode’s neat webchat gateway, available from within the Contact section. This should pave the way for further coordination between developers and repository administrators using our official discussion and support channel.

In this opportunity I’ve also opted for standardizing the spelling of our short project name to “Wesnoth-UMC-Dev”, as opposed to the earlier “wesnoth-umc-dev” and “Wesnoth UMC Dev[elopment]”.

There are bugs that remain to be fixed though, which are related to the feeds handling within the various site components — but nothing that is going to matter for the moment due to our rather restricted audience.

So there goes another bit to add to my web design stories, an experience from which I’ve learned a lot of valuable information for my work on “Dorset5”.

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project website is now running with the Hakone layout system, but the blog section is currently not operational due to administrative issues I hope to have solved within the next 24 hours.

I have deliberately avoided to return to the issue of forum games in Wesnoth.org for a long while, but Gambit and I have become increasingly worried about the board’s security due to potential guidelines violations from people who register for the sole purpose of playing a game on a forum thread.

I feel that this practice derails the Off-Topic forum as a whole. My intention when gaining control over it was to make it a fun place for us Wesnoth users, not to convert it into a general social forum with no relation whatsoever to Wesnoth’s community. As things look right now, we may have an issue in our front door which needs to be solved before the intention behind the forum’s existence vanishes even further due to this kind of invasions.

Therefore, I’d appreciate if people stopped publicizing Off-Topic threads elsewhere for entertainment purposes. The “Roll 2 Dodge” forum game has become a special case of its own after we discovered a forum member posting links to it on other forums (along with hotlinking forum smilies for some reason, no less). You don’t want the Off-Topic forum to go back to its old administration practices where autopruning was considered a feature by the Powers That Be™, right? An alternative is restricting it to known members of the community using more advanced management techniques with phpBB, but I don’t think we want that either if we can manage a reasonable deal without software intervention.

It’s a tradition of mine to assign random codenames to my projects when they are early in development, usually because I haven’t decided on a definitive production name at the time, or in other cases, just for fun. Here’s a rather complete list of the names I have used for this purpose and why, for the curious.

Web shadow: the original layout for this very site, which got later replaced by Dorset.

Dorset: this is probably the first project of mine with a formal codename convention, using the name of a Far North location from the Battle for Wesnoth — as a bonus it’s also a real-world location. It has now become more of a production name.

Soradoc: yet another Wesnothian location, this corresponds to the first layout for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website.

Kalari: a location relevant to the plot of one of my campaigns, After the Storm; this is the current Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website layout as of 2010, soon to be replaced. Since Wesnoth-UMC-Dev was originally built around the prequel Invasion from the Unknown it was just logical to choose a name from my own canon as a codename for the second website layout.

Hakone: initially mentioned by me in ##shadowm as a joke, this became the production name for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev 2011 website layout. This name corresponds to an actual location in Japan (箱根町), which is also the area where Tokyo-3 was built in the Neon Genesis Evangelion series.

Scrappy: the build-external-archive.sh tool from Wesnoth-UMC-Dev. Useless, annoying, and ultimately dangerous. It has truly become our personal Scrappy, hence the name.

Blackmore: the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Duke Nukem Forever — I mean Distribution Package Tool, potentially going to use umcdist as production name. Blackmore is a city in the Green Isle from the Battle for Wesnoth, The Rise of Wesnoth.

Thoria: umcreg, the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Registry Service, which is in charge of abstracting user and add-on management for us administrators.

Listra: codenamed after the Wesnothian river, umcstat has this assigned after its relationship with the umcreg service.

Everlore: yet another Wesnothian river, also related to the Arkan-Thoria and umcreg — this is the current codename for the Atom feed front-end to umcreg.

Rei II: named after the character from Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is Rei 2 IRC Bot, which spent around a year in planning as a C framework until I decided to ease the task and reuse Irssi’s core, turning Rei2 into a small-ish Perl module and libraries for writing simple IRC bots for this fantastic IRC client.

Elynia: better known as Shikadibot 0314, our old utility bot that used to linger in the #wesnoth-umc-dev channel until we replaced its core with Rei2’s.

Asuka: again, a character from Neon Genesis Evangelion, it is the PHP code powering the little Wesnoth Fortunes database I serve on this site.

Poison Ivy: codenamed after the plant of the same name, this is the PHP engine that generates most pages on this and Wesnoth-UMC-Dev’s website. It has now stuck as part of the production name, “Poison Ivy PHP Engine”.

Morning Star: the temporary production name used for Wesnoth RCX at the beginning.

Naia: an abandoned branch that intended to generalize the framework used by umcreg in order to port umcstat’s prototype to use it.

Although I had originally set the completion deadline for codename “Hakone” to March 2011, after one week and two days of development it’s close enough to final for an early deployment, hopefully before the end of the year.

This is the fifth website layout I’ve designed, now joining the list along with “Dorset0”, Dorset, Soradoc and Kalari — but Hakone is somewhat unusual in that its CSS was written from scratch rather than being based on a previous template, while less than 40% of the basic HTML structure was inherited from Kalari.

Dorset0

Dorset

Dorset 2

Soradoc

Dorset3

Kalari

Dorset4

Dorset5a1

Hakone

Table 1. Site development relationship tree.

Hakone is also the first site layout in which I reset margins and padding attributes for all HTML elements and specify them manually instead of allowing the web browser to use its internal defaults. This technique appears to work much better across browsers than my previous selective overrides. Consequently, Hakone looks very good and usable on IE 6 and 7, despite the usage of CSS 2/2.1 and 3 features in some places.

To get an idea of how much Hakone has changed since its first incarnation, take a look at this ’shot:

Besides the renewed appearance for 2011, Hakone is also intended to bring some functionality improvements and administrative changes around the place. For starters, the front page will pull feeds from a local blog which will be deployed using Blosxom for simplicity, in which we’ll dump any important updates we deem appropriate to share. Interestingly, we used to have a blog at the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website at the beginning, but the lack of interest from the other admins doomed it to death.

I also intend to add XML feeds support to the Registry Service frontend in order to announce newly added users and projects. I don’t know yet how that’ll be achieved, though — but bet on an update here as soon as I have a plan for it.

By adding more documentation to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev 2011 website we should also be able to drop most of the contents of the official forum thread, which is currently unmaintained and redundant.

Finally, with all these changes we hope to attract more add-on authors and maintainers to our project. Despite a few administrative issues, we have already hosted large and popular add-ons such as Ageless Era, and campaigns which are currently part of Wesnoth’s mainline, including Legend of Wesmere and Delfador’s Memoirs. We don’t know yet where the community will take us next year, but I expect some amazing work to come out of the repository soon.